Life & Letters: What We Need

Monday, November 30, 2009

What We Need

A selection from a letter by Martyn Lloyd-Jones to the Rev. Ron Clarke, minister of Buckingham Chapel, Clifton, England. Both men were in poor health. Lloyd-Jones was only a few months away from death but wrote in response to a letter received from Mr. Clarke. The letter reveals his contentment in the midst of sickness. It was written December 4, 1980.

We have both been passing through new experiences and I am sure that you feel as I do that finally nothing matters but the fact that we are in God’s hands. We and our works are nothing. It is His choosing us before the foundation of the world that matters and He will never leave us nor forsake us. More and more do I see that what we need is a simple child-like faith, just to believe His word and surrender ourselves to Him utterly.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones Letters 1919-1981, Selected with Notes, by Ian H. Murray, Banner of Truth, 1994, p. 231.

6 comments:

William Wilson said...: I must say Deon a very good artcle on the good Dr loyed Jones and how we can learn from him and his preaching. So keep up the good work my faithful servant.; December 4, 2009 at 9:42 AM
William Wilson said...: I must say Deon a very good artcle on the Good Dr Loyed jones. And very intersting to read it and we can learn from him and his preaching.So keep up the Lord's Good work my faithful servant.; December 4, 2009 at 9:43 AM
William Wilson said...: I must say Deon a very good artcle on the Good Dr Loyed jones. And very intersting to read it and we can learn from him and his preaching.So keep up the Lord's Good work my faithful servant.; December 4, 2009 at 9:43 AM
William Wilson said...: I must say Deon a very good artcle on the Good Dr Loyed jones. And very intersting to read it and we can learn from him and his preaching.So keep up the Lord's Good work my faithful servant.; December 4, 2009 at 9:44 AM
William Wilson said...: I must say Deon a very good artcle on the Good Dr Loyed jones. And very intersting to read it and we can learn from him and his preaching.So keep up the Lord's Good work my faithful servant.; December 4, 2009 at 9:44 AM
Dean Olive said...: William,

Thanks for your encouragement. We can learn a lot from the letters of men like Lloyd-Jones.; December 4, 2009 at 4:14 PM

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Why Life & Letters?

Before e-mails, telephones and text-messaging, people wrote letters to one another. Letters are personal and thoughtful. We can be thankful that biographers have letters to and from the people they write about from generations gone by, for modern forms of commu-nication leave us in want. Letters have a quality about them not found in e-mails. Historian and biographer, David McCullough, says, “I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future gen-erations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, per-haps even impossible to write.”

It is a shame that few of us today craft letters to our children and friends. Letter writing is a lost art. I hope this blog will inspire others to write letters. Letters are valuable. C. H. Spurgeon said, “A man’s private letters often let you into the secrets of the heart.

Most of what appears here are selections taken from letters of Evangelical Christians. There will also be occasional reviews of books of letters.

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

"In the nineteenth century, many biographers wrote books titled The Life and Letters of So-and-So. While this was not always an eloquent way of writing history, it speaks volumes about our cultural distance; if restricted to composing a narrative of someone’s life around his written correspondence today, we wouldn’t be able to write biographies, because people write too few letters to constitute the substance of a book. Further, if you read those nineteenth-century letters, you cannot fail to notice how articulate, thoughtful, and well composed they commonly are. A culture that was accustomed to thoughtful, well-composed letters produced remarkable significant letters, even among fairly common people. Today, we have become a culture of telephone babblers, unskilled at the most basic questions of composition…"

Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2009, pp. 66-67.

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

Monday, November 30, 2009

What We Need

6 comments:

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Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

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